DVBLink Live Comes to Live Channels

DVBLink bills itself as “your very personal TV server”. You can use a small device, such as a Raspberry Pi, and provide a channel feed from many different sources. You can record videos, or just use it to stream live TV from your server to any other device through the Internet. It works in a web browser or through dedicated mobile applications.

The DVBLink Live app has been in development for Android TV, designed to integrate with the Live Channels feature. Just announced yesterday, it supplies channels, epg (electronic program guide), and TV streams to Live Channels so you can watch them with the rest of your channel sources.

The app is still in early production. First, you will have to sideload it. It’s not in the Play Store.

Other known issues they report are that multiple audio channels, though supported, are unlabeled. Subtitles and closed captioning are not currently supported at all, although it is something that could be implemented in the Live Channels app. A show’s long description is not something that is exposed to the UI, so you’ll only be able to see a shorter description of the content you’re watching. Authorization is not supported either yet.

Aside from those areas where it could use some additional polish, the integration works pretty well. That being said, you will need to obtain one of the DVBLink products in order to pull in this channel data, and it is something that will work much better in Europe, where the company is stationed, than in the United States.

The app will continue to be developed, with the developers promising authentication support in the next couple of days. This early version serves as a good proof of concept and now more features can be built on top of these TV streams.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.